Pleasure All Over the Place: Paperazzi
by Paul D'AgostinoPaperazzi 2
Janet Kurnatowski Gallery
Janet Kurnatowski Gallery
Mixed-media works are abundant, as are abstraction and whimsy; the layout flows and pauses and almost feigns, from certain angles, to float. The show at hand (through February 10)—the gallery’s fourth-annual celebration of works on paper showcasing mostly NYC-based artists—exudes simplicity and superfluousness at once, and you breathe it in all the better thanks to both.
In a room full of so many colors and mediums, in a sense—or due to a certain manner of glancing—it is the deep pitch of black ink that stands out. Thus might the bold, contrast-heavy works by Evelyn Twitchell, Michael Volonakis, Nathlie Provosty and Katsuhisa Sakai string you, ever pleased, along one wall. Here, though, you will also find Loren Munk’s colorfully sprawling infomap of Bushwick, a text-heavy work in which accuracies in variable inputs are secondary, at best, to their collective visual punch: this is explosion; this is 'blown up.' If anyone knows this stuff, it’s Mr. Munk. Farther down the wall, then, and anything but infographic is Alice Zinnes’s Sight in the Blue Mist of Why, a poem of a watercolor in which fine details perch delicately amid washed away pigments that seem yet to deliquesce.
A few other less atmospheric though no less lovely landscape-like works are Karen Marston’s Crashing Wave, Kathleen Vance’s Forest Floor and Marianne Barcellona’s Iceland Trek, the latter a faithful capturing of a lava-rocky hinterland beneath attenuative, polar-waned light. Just below is Chris Martin’s splendidly simplified schematic of a centrifugal oculus, let’s say; nearby is Ben La Rocco’s mixedly diagrammatic contemplation of a manhole. And then there’s Elizabeth Riley’s handsome exploitation of screenshots, as well as Phong Bui’s history-steeped collage of a Brooklyn Rail that never was, or that never will be—yet one that exists here, nonetheless, in exquisite reliquary.
There are many other great works on view as well. And there’s a back room, too. And if here we’ve mentioned 13 pieces, that’s 13 out of 132. At any rate, Paperazzi is rife with pleasures all around, and if your resolutions for the new year included seeing or buying more art, go check out this show and get a head start on both.
You can follow Paul D'Agostino on Twitter @postuccio
